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This is just the sort of thing Theodore Maiman said he had
in mind when was interviewed 50 years ago, after being the first to successfully demonstrate
the laser: medical procedures that would change or even save lives in ways as
yet unimagined.
This time, the laser has been used to perform surgery on an unborn fetus.
Surgeons at the University of Miami’s
Jackson Memorial Hospital reported they have performed the first-ever in utero surgery on a fetus. A rare tumor diagnosed about halfway through the pregnancy via ultrasound was
removed from the roof of the mouth using laesr technology. A few months later, the baby was born at full-term and
healthy.
Never mind that one newspaper at the time called Maiman’s
pioneering ruby laser “a solution in search of a problem.” Applications have
been developed in nearly every facet of life, and the list of medical solutions
that lasers provide is impressive.
Starting from the beginning, medical applications of lasers were life-enhancing
-- removi…

Through the capabilities of optics and photonics, astronomical
telescopes and instrumentation systems have vastly increased humankind’s knowledge
about the physical composition and history of the universe -- including our own
planet and its natural phenomena.
And, again thanks to optics and photonics, these
mind-bending data and dazzling images are not the purview of only astronomers
and physicists. Images in particular -- arriving at Earth, as Nobel Laureate
Saul Perlmutter observed in a recent talk, on light that left its origin in
the cosmos in some cases before our solar system was formed-- are rendered on
desktops and television screens everywhere, bringing the furthest reaches of space into homes, classrooms and offices.
Of course, new information prompts new questions.
Theorists such as Stephen Hawking pondering a Theory of Everything to explain some of those unanswered questions look
for clues in the results of past and present missions such as the Hubble
Space Telescope and …

(SPIE Member Jijo Ulahannan, assistant professor at
Government College Kasaragod in India, is among students at the biophotonics
and imaging graduate summer school 7-13 June at the National University of
Ireland [NUI] Galway. He filed this guest blog with a first-hand report.)

The international Biophotonics and Imaging Graduate Summer School (BIGSS 2012) is underway in the beautiful coastal city of Galway
focusing on two of the hottest topics in the field of biophotonics, namely optical
coherence tomography (OCT) and photoacoustic imaging.
About 30 graduate students and early career professionals are
here for the event, which is organized by the NUI Galway Applied Optics group
and chaired by Professor Martin Leahy who also leads the National Biophotonics
Platform Ireland. Major sponsors are SPIE and Photonics4Life.

The summer school brings the past, present and trends for
the future of biophotonics and microscopic imaging techniques to aspiring young
graduates and post-doctoral fellow…

Authored by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, the Photonics for a Better World blog focuses on research news and the many ways technologies are applied to advance science and improve quality of life, and on the people who make that happen.